An application template is a portable persistent description of a configuration of a software system with defined ‘points of variability’, which are parameters which can be changed by a user or program developer to customize the software system to represent a particular application. A system using such application templates has been proposed by IBM Corporation, and is described in IBM's co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/686,059.
In this system, when a user has configured a software system to a particular purpose using configuration and customization tools for each component in the software system, the user can create a template of the resultant configuration using a template tool. The user identifies the set of components in the software system that represents the application to be templated and browses the configuration of this set to identify the configuration elements which are to be set as the points of variability in the template. All other settings are considered fixed. The template tool traverses the set of components and extracts their prerequisites and content.
The present invention aims to provide an improved mechanism for aggregating components, and in particular to provide a generic, reusable aggregation component that generalizes the functions of aggregation and specialization of templatable components.